Ken Loach

Typist, Director, Documentarian

Like the Italian neo-realists (especially Vittorio De Sica) who served as his inspiration, Ken Loach has acquired a reputation as the leading socially conscious director working in Britain. A quiet, soft-spoken man, he ... Read more »

Like the Italian neo-realists (especially Vittorio De Sica) who served as his inspiration, Ken Loach has acquired a reputation as the leading socially conscious director working in Britain. A quiet, soft-spoken man, he hardly seems the "dean of leftist movie makers" (as he was dubbed by THE NEW YORK TIMES in June 1998). The son of a working-class factory worker, Loach served in the Royal Air Force, studied law and then worked in theater, first as an understudy and later touring Birmingham in a repertory company. To make end meet, he picked up work as a teacher.

University of Oxford

Helmed "The Wind That Shakes the Barley" about two brothers who join the guerrilla armies formed to battle the British during the Irish Civil War in 1919; won the Palme d'Or at the Cannes Film Festival

2004

Directed "Ae Fond Kiss" about tension that arises when a young Asian man enters into a relationship with a Caucasian woman

2002

Directed the film "Sweet Sixteen" about a boy determined to have a normal family life once his mother gets out of prison

2001

Helmed "The Navigators"; screened at Venice International Film Festival; scheduled to air on Channel 4 in November

2000

Third collaboration with Laverty, "Bread and Roses"

1998

Second film with Laverty, "My Name Is Joe"; shown at the Cannes Film Festival

Worked primarily in television during the 1980s, directing only two features, "Looks and Smiles" (1981) and "Fatherland/Singing the Blues in Red" (1986; released in the USA in 1988)

Professional debut as comedian's understudy in a revue

Served two years in Royal Air Force as a typist

Was a performer and director with a repertory company in Birmingham

About the lack of financing for his films in the late 1970s and early 1980s, Loach told THE NEW YORK TIMES (June 14, 1998): "If the British movie industry at the time had any perception of what I did, it was that I made films in an impenetrable dialect, driven by a kind of hard-line Marxist view, which no one would want to see. And, if they did want to see them, they wouldn't understand them anyway."